mmcirvin | January 13, 1982

Roger Shuy describes the eerie experience of walking home through the snowstorm from an almost deserted Washington National Airport on the day of the 1982 Air Florida crash. His trip home was also impeded by a shutdown on the Metro:

Routinely, I went outside to take a taxi home. No taxis. So I crossed the street to board the Metro. After sitting on it for some thirty minutes, I learned that there had been a fire on the Metro on some other line, causing the entire system to shut down.

Actually, it wasn't a fire on some other line; it was a derailment and collision that killed three people near the Federal Triangle station, which was on the same line as National Airport, the Blue Line (the section through downtown DC is shared by the Orange Line as well). Since the collision happened more or less simultaneously with the plane crash, it was hard to get emergency services to the subway crash site. It remains the worst fatal accident in the history of the DC subway system, though there was an accident in 2004 at Woodley Park-Zoo that could have been far worse had the train been full.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Wow-- I've never heard of these crashes, even though I was in Virginia at the time (Virginia Beach, a 4-hour-drive south). My excuse is that I was 6. I don't even recall Air Florida Airlines existing. I do recall that half a dozen east coast airlines had been born and died trying to make money hauling people to Florida-- I have strong associations between Eastern AL and Disneyland because of their ads together, and the there's good ol' Valuejet, whose most famous jet crashed in the Everglades. If I ever set up an airline on the east coast, it's gonna stop at southern edge of Georgia, I tell you what.

I remember the snowstorm-not the worst we'd seen but pretty bad, and I think my bus actually went to school, maybe with a delay, and got turned back. At least, I have a dim recollection of similarly being out in the blizzard and only finding out about the day's disasters after getting back inside.

...though this stuff all happened in the late afternoon, so it would have been long after I got home if school was cancelled.

...Aha, the storm didn't develop until the afternoon. School probably at least started at the normal time, though they may have closed early.

I have some dim recall of contemporary snowstorms in that area-- sometime before then, perhaps when I was 2-4 or 3-5 or so (I can only be certain that I started first grade in Virginia Beach at a new school, and since we lived a total of 9 years there, but we left in the winter of 7th grade...) anyway, Dad was stationed at the Pentagon for about 2 years (that's a guess, but a typical tour length for someone that in that part of his career) when I was a toddler out in west Fairfax Cty.

I have a recollection of being rescued from deep snow (probably a foot or less) by my mother, and another time when, owing to the L-shape of our house forming a snowdrift against it, my dad disembarked the roof of the (single-story) house (where he had probably been clearing snow) by just jumping off the roof into that drift, startling me to tears. Weird how I recall that.

Virginia Beach is comparatively mild, and, Seattle milder still. We got 2" last night, but the city is perpetually unprepared for a complete response, because snow accumulation is an every-3-to-7-years thing, so there's just not enough equipment.

It wasn't too long after I was 6 that I started watching the CBS Evening News with my Dad; I was a faithful Ratherite throughout the 80s, so I got a decent cross section of disaster news throughout the rest of that decade.

On a whim, I checked the accident record in wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_monorail#Accidents) for the Seattle Center Monorail. Fairly harmless accidents-- and one incident of a wheel falling off and landing on a windshield (of a European tourist, IIRC) below seems to be missing. Fortunately nothing fatal, listed or not. The March 31st, 2004 accident omits that it was Monday, Memorial Day, and a warm one, at that-- Memorial Weekend is the weekend of "Folk Life," a free folk arts & music festival, one of the first major events of the season at Seattle Center and one that really brings out the crowds.

However, scale these accidents up per passenger*miles (considering that one or two monorail trains moves A to B, and B to A along a 2-mile track, every 10 to 15 minutes during operation) compared to the DC metro, and you've got one hazardous system. :^)

I'm reading "the up side of down" by Thomas Homer-Dixon. He talks about how systems break down when too much shit happens at once.

He's canadian, by the way.

January 13, 1982

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